Brex co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras.
Brex
Capital One said Thursday that it was acquiring payments startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the latest splashy deal undertaken by CEO Richard Fairbank.
The firm, which disclosed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings statement, said it would pay 50% cash and 50% stock for Brex.
Shares of the bank fell about 3%.
Under Fairbank, a rare founder-CEO of a major U.S. bank, Capital One acquired rival card firm Discover Financial last year for about $35 billion. That deal was Fairbank’s crowning achievement, giving the credit card lender access to one of the only payment networks of any scale.
“Since our founding, we set out to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution,” Fairbank said in a release. “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace.”
Fairbank said that Brex pioneered the combination of corporate cards, banking and spend management software: “They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top,” he said.
Capital One, which has offered business cards for decades, became increasingly convinced that it was Brex’s model that would be the winning offering, according to a person with knowledge of the lender’s strategy.
“We didn’t have to pursue this acquisition, our growth was incredibly strong,” Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi told CNBC in an interview.
Combining their technology with Capital One’s reach and resources would speed up their scale faster than as a standalone firm, he said.
